


sing me an epilogue

by faerietell



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Lance is weak for Keith, M/M, Post-Season/Series 08, Spoilers for Season 8, allura is important and beautiful, beta reading did not happen, farmer lance, humanitarian hero keith, kinda moves fast but lol so did the season, you can see why keith is the original red paladin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faerietell/pseuds/faerietell
Summary: There was something wrong with the sweet corn, and as usual, it was Keith Kogane's fault.





	sing me an epilogue

There was something wrong with the sweet corn.

It had been bothering Lance all morning. He had woken to the crowing of the rooster, when the world was still dark and quiet. He liked complaining about it, but it reminded him of space. Vast, empty, another kind of home. Lance had spent months yearning to return to earth.

He _missed_ the galaxies, travelling through wormholes, the rush of adrenaline but – but he wouldn’t leave this.

He missed Allura.

Lance had stumbled blearily through his routine. He milked the cows, scrubbed down the countertops, played Paladin with the kids, and thought about the corn.

“There’s something wrong with the corn,” he declared.

Luis squinted at the fields of corn, swaying gold in the mid-day sun. “Looks fine to me.”

“The pesticide’s still working?” Lance asked. A new breed of alien pests had attacked their crop last year, but Pidge had come up with a solution, that brilliant freaky little gremlin. But earth pests grew immune, and the alien variety was sure to be even weirder.

“Still working,” Luis squinted at him this time. “Are you getting enough sleep?”

Lance muttered under his breath and went into the house.

“Mama,” he interrupted. “ _El maiz es raro_.”

Mama doesn’t look up from her phone. “ _Eres raro_.”

“I’m not weird,” he protested. “And even if I was, it’d the cool weird. Unique. Best sharpshooter.” The last slipped out, habit, and there was an odd pang in his chest. Lance brushed it off.

“Look at what Shiro sent me,” Mama waved her phone at him. “It’s a meme.”

“Stop _texting my ex-boss_ ,” he whined.

Mama ignored him. “You’re paranoid, _bebé_. Forget the corn.”

Lance considered calling Pidge or Veronica. _They_ would understand about the corn. Didn’t Mama or Luis or someone get that their _livelihoods_ depended on the corn? Alright, maybe that was an exaggeration. Ex-heroes didn’t go broke, but what about the farming industry? The corn industry? The local market?

Lance fell asleep, still thinking about corn.

 

 

 

 

“Wake up. Lance. Come on.”

“Go away,” Lance muttered into the pillow. He answered to the rooster, or he answered to nothing.

There was a warm touch on his bare shoulder, almost skimming it. There was a strange, sleepy instinct to lean into it, but before he could, something clasped his shoulder, shaking him.

An exasperated voice. “Lance.”

“Ugh,” Lance managed, groggily sitting up. There was _Keith_ , fucking _Keith Kogane_ , sitting on the edge of his bed. “What the fuck, man?”

“You drool in your sleep,” he informed. Helpfully. Not.

“Wha - ?” Lance wasn’t catching up to everything that was going on here. “Is this… a sex dream? Am I dreaming?”

Yeah, that made sense. Sure, he saw Keith every year on Allura’s day, but that was about it. He kind of figured they didn’t really _exist_ out of battle. Hunk and Lance were best bros for life. Pidge was his little sister in everything but blood. Shiro was Team Dad.

Keith? Keith was his lungs in battle, his commanding officer, a rebel, a neat freak, the melee to his gun. Without a war, they had everything in common and nothing.

“ _What?_ ” He sputtered. “Just – do you – what?”

Lance tilted his head to the side. “… No?”

Keith sighed and reached out and – _“Ow_.”

“It’s not a dream,” Keith said flatly. It was difficult to tell in the dark, but there was a red flush creeping up his face.

Wait, fuck, did he just – okay, he was just going to roll along. Forget it. “Okay… No offense, dude, but why are you here?”

“I need you.”

It was kind of disappointing this wasn’t a sex dream, with the way Keith said _that_. Lance kept his cool because he was a cool, chill dude. “For what?”

“A secret mission.”

He eyed Keith. “What’s the mission?”

“It’s a secret.”

Lance smashed his face back into the pillow, into the warm, comforting embrace of navy-blue sheets and routine. “I’m retired. Ask someone else. Aren’t you dating that pilot – ”

“Pidge made that up,” Keith rolled his eyes. “I don’t have time to date. Anyway, I need you, specifically.”

Lance didn’t know what to say. He was _retired_. Sure, he went to Altea every year, did talks at the Garrison or Atlas sometimes, but he didn’t do this anymore. He liked the farm. He liked the quiet.

The hand returned to his shoulder, warm and solid. “The galaxy’s calling you, Lance.”

“No, _you_ are,” he muttered into his pillow. “But I guess I’m still answering.”

 

 

There was an alien ship in the middle of his cornfield. “ _You’re_ what’s wrong with my corn,” he accused.

“Sorry?” Keith shrugged. It had been hard to make him out in the dimness of his room, but now Lance could see him, lit up by the goddamn stars. There was more breadth to his shoulders than last year, and his mouth looked like it had learnt how to smile.

“You still have a mullet,” Lance said, climbing into the ship. “What tech is this?”

Keith rolled his eyes and ignored the observation. “Altean and Galran.” He scratched his neck, embarrassed. “Uh, my mom gave it to me. As a birthday present.”

Lance didn’t tease him, no matter how much he wanted to, for the flush that crept over him. “Cool, bro,” he climbed in after him. It was strange to be trapped in metal and sky again but in a good way. “Sooo, where are we going?”

“Galaxy A2-Phi,” Keith said, fiddling with the controls.

Lance didn’t even _know_ if Keith was messing with him. “Can I get a nearby familiar planet?”

“Hold on tight,” Keith smirked ( _God, he missed that smirk_ ), and they soared.

 

 

“Dude, when do we _get there?”_ Lance whined, draping his body over Keith. Keith shoved him off.

“Another twelve hours,” Keith said. “Like I told you _five minutes ago_.”

“Time’s weird in space!”

They had travelled for two and a half days already, and that was a long time when Lance didn’t even know where the fuck they were going. Keith’s ship didn’t have much for entertainment. Someone (Pidge, probably) had left a Voltron comic books, as inspired by the original paladins (aka Lance and entourage), but he could only read about himself _so long._

Keith was not good company. It wasn’t like he usually was, but it had been a long time, and Lance didn’t know how to Keith and Lance. Mostly, Keith just told him to “shut up, Lance, I’m concentrating”.

“Let’s talk,” he said. “About anything.”

“Fine,” Keith gave in. “What?”

So, Lance hadn’t really been expecting a _yes_. “Uh, what’s the tea?”

“The… tea?” Keith asked.

“How long have you been away from Earth?” Lance asked. “The tea. The salt. The _gossip_.”

“Oh,” Keith blinked. “Well, Rizavi has developed a new piloting maneuver – ”

“No, no, no,” Lance waved his hands around passionately. If he was going to do anything, it was going to be with _flair_. “I meant fun gossip.” Keith was probably going to need a more specific geographic location. “Like whose dating who?”

“Uh,” Keith winced. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” Lance grinned. “Don’t wanna tell me? Why? Is it someone you like? Do you have a crush? Are _you_ – ”

“Acxa likes Veronica,” Keith blurted out.

“What?” Lance asked, eyes widening. “Holy fuck. I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!” He danced where he stood. “Veronica’s wrong, Lance is right, just the usual.”

Keith shot him an amused look. “Don’t meddle.”

“I never meddle,” Lance protested even though Veronica was definitely going to get an _I told you_ text the instant he got Wi-fi. “What else?”

“Did Shiro tell you he was going to propose?”

Shiro had also retired, and he was the one Lance saw most in-person. They had coffee every month, and Lance mocked the geek glasses. “Yeah,” Lance grinned. “I’m happy for him.”

Keith smiled, and it was unbearably soft. “Me too.”

 

 

New Olkarion was _humid_. Everything stuck to his skin, sticky and sweaty. Now, he looked good in any weather, but this was kind of pushing it. He glared at Keith, walking ahead of him, hacking through vines all effortless and cool.

“Can I know what the secret mission is yet?” Lance panted. He might work on a farm all day, but it had been a while since he trekked through a tropical alien surface.

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Keith said, but he fell back so they could walk side by side. “Can I ask a personal question?”

Lance laughed. “Buddy, we’ve known each other long enough for that.” Personal? They had been stuck in a flying castle with only six other people for company. They had fought and lost their minds and travelled through realities. Yeah, he could ask something personal.

“Have you… dated since?” Keith asked. He didn’t specify what since was, but he didn’t have to.

“A little,” Lance said after a pause. “And it’s not… It’s not about her, I mean, it’s always a little about her but – it’s just, no one… No one gets it.”

Keith didn’t say anything, but it was a listening kind of silence. It had taken Lance a long time to learn this, but Keith was just as good of a listener as Hunk. He wasn’t _comforting_ or _cuddly_ , but he was quiet, understanding.

“Not grief. I think, after all that happened, we all get grief. I just don’t know how to share a – a connection with someone who doesn’t get how it feels to fly a lion. Or defeat Zarkon.”

“If that’s your criteria, your pool’s pretty limited,” Keith said. “Shiro’s engaged, and Pidge has a boyfriend.”

“What?” Lance squawked. “She didn’t tell me.”

“She didn’t tell me either,” Keith grimaced. “I walked in on them.”

Lance burst into laughter because God, yes, he could imagine just how Keith looked like, mortified and sputtering apologies. He tried not to think about how he didn’t include himself in this ‘pool’.

“I don’t need them to be a paladin,” Lance explained a little while later, before the quiet properly sunk in. The second sun was setting, and red-gold shadows bled through the canopy overhead. “The last dude I dated, he was great. He was an agricultural major, and he had serious opinions about farming which, dude, I tell you is hard to find. Do you have opinions about farming?”

Keith shrugged. “I have opinions about deserts?”

“What are they?”

“I like them. They’re warm in the day, cool in the night.”

That was pretty much what Lance expected. “My family loved him, and I loved him. But he didn’t get it. I need someone to get it.”

“You’ll find someone,” Keith paused to look at him with those solemn dark eyes. “You’re Lance.”

“That a good thing?” Lance asked with an odd sort of laugh.

“I’ve always thought so.”

 

 

They reached the ruin of some alien civilization, a crumbling castle with wide, smooth doors, and windows that reflected a thousand colors. In the dying daylight, it glowed.

Something caught in his throat. “It’s beautiful.”

“It doesn’t open,” Keith explained as they climbed the sheer black steps that lead up to the door. “Pidge tried to hack in, but it’s a collaboration of Galran and Altean technology. It needs a touch from both.” He looked at Lance expectantly.

Lance took a step back. “It might not work.”

Keith nodded. “It might not.”

“You could have asked Romelle. Or Coran.”

“But I asked you,” Keith said, and he placed his hand against a black panel in the center of the door.

Lance glanced at him again, curious, but he moved to the right, placing his hand against an identical white panel. The moment he did, the door rumbled, sliding down until his hand met nothing, and there was a dark opening before them.

Keith stepped in. “I’m doing this as a favor. Obviously, the Blade doesn’t really do missions anymore.”

Lance followed him. Each section of the hallway lit up as they passed it, their steps in sequence. “I wasn’t really feeling humanitarian aid vibes.”

“There’s a rumor that the location of another comet ore that can pass through realities can be found here,” Keith explained. “The Coalition wants to destroy it. Pidge hates the idea, but… ”

Lance didn’t. No one should have to survive what they did. No one should suffer like Lotor. No one should die somewhere where their body would never be found again.

“Why did you really ask me here?” Lance asked because it wasn’t for a secret mission. It wasn’t because of the corn.

Keith stopped where he stood. “Are you… happy?”

“What?” Lance asked.

“Are you happy?” Keith repeated. “Does your life give you fulfillment? Are you really content being a farmer when you spent your life wanting to be the best fighter pilot there was?”

Lance stared at him. “Oh, what, so being a farmer isn’t good enough? I saved the world once. I don’t have to do it again.”

“I didn’t mean – ”

“Yeah, you did,” Lance said. “I live with my family. Did you forget all that time I was homesick? Staring at the stars and trying to figure out which one pointed home? Don’t you remember making up weird names for constellations because we’ve never seen them in our life?”

“I didn’t forget.”

“Feels like you did,” Lance shrugged, trying to be casual when all this anger was burning up inside of him, hot and alive in his throat. It was like he was choking on it. “Feels like you forgot all about me.”

Keith tried to say something, but Lance stomped off into the darkness before he could.

 

 

It turned out stomping away in a dark, ancient alien ruin was usually a bad idea. It took about approximately twenty seconds for Lance to get lost, but hey, he would be fine.

So, Allura had really left a part of herself with him. She was a part of his heart, his lungs, and now his cells and atoms. His blood and electricity. He was glad for it. The universe might remember her sacrifice, but they wouldn’t know her. Not like he did.

And he hadn’t even really gotten to know her. They didn’t have time.

It drove him crazy sometimes, how _unfair_ that was. He had loved, he had lost, and he was a _kid_. Allura, even at ten thousand years, was a _kid_. They never got to live. They didn’t get to grow into wearing geeky glasses and doing taxes and all the stupid stuff that came with being adult.

It had been five years. Lance had moved on, but he didn’t forget her. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to. He sighed, sinking down in the room he was in, dark and dusty. There was a central pad with the same panels that had been on the door, but he didn’t bother touching it. It wouldn’t work without Keith.

He did like being a farmer. He loved his family, he loved the mornings, he loved the crop. It just wasn’t enough. Lance had always been greedy, starved for love, aching for a touch, reaching out for the stars because the ocean wasn’t enough.

Keith always had to be fucking right, didn’t he?

Lance laughed, a little bitter, and his head tilted back to hit the wall.

“I’m sorry,” a voice reached him, and Keith slid down to sit next to him. “That… That was stupid. I didn’t mean to push you.”

“No,” Lance said. “It’s okay. But I still don’t get it. Why did you ask me? I never get what’s going on behind that mullet.”

“I wanted to see if a mission would make you happy,” Keith said slowly. “I wanted to make you happy.”

Lance stole a glance at him. “It did.”

Keith fiddled with the collar of his shirt. “That’s good.”

And then it hit him. He lit up, grinning ear from ear, and crowed, “You _like me._ ”

Keith twisted to stare at him, wide-eyed. “What? I do not.”

“Yes, you do,” Lance said gleefully. “You flew down millions of light years and ruined my corn because you _like me_.”

“I didn’t ruin your _corn_ ,” Keith said. “And you’re being ridiculous. As usual.” He was a brilliant shade of red, and Lance just ate it up. Keith stood. “Help me with the panel.”

“Sure, lover-boy,” Lance winked, standing up as well.

When he placed his hand next to Keith, he said: “I like you, too.”

(Lance had liked him at sixteen for the first time, and he decided he was his rival. He decided he wasn’t going to like dumb boys with mullets at seventeen. At eighteen, he thought he would never love again.)

The room swam with light.

 

 

Six months later, an alien ship landed in the middle of a cornfield in Texas. Well, right next to one.

The moment Lance stepped out, his niece was there to shriek and hug him. Lance laughed, catching her by the waist and swinging her around. Not that he was the favorite anymore. The rest of his nephews and nieces had raced past him to try to climb up Keith instead.

Gleefully, Lance left him to the torture and went to hug his mama, babbling to her in Spanish.

“ _Estas feliz_?” She asked him, lines of age and happiness wearing on her face. Lance wanted to grow up like that, loved and surrounded by love. That was nothing new. He had always wanted to be like his mother.

“The happiest,” Lance answered her in English, so Keith would know, too. “By the way, how was the corn this year?”

In the past few months, he had taken a stint working with Keith to deliver humanitarian aid throughout the galaxies. Lance had been thinking about talking to Shiro, starting their own Blade of Marmora right on Earth. The earth still needed defending, but Lance was just a different kind of hero now.

“The best we’ve had in years,” Mama said. “No idea why. _Tu hermano_ is confused, but I don’t question blessings.”

“Huh,” he grinned, glancing around the sea of gold. “Should’ve seen that coming.”

“You’re so strange,” Mama shook her head. “Go rescue your boyfriend.”

Lance laughed and listened to his mother, shooing the kids away and helping Keith lock up the ship (“Keithy-Keith, No one’s going to _steal it_ ” “Do you not remember anything that has ever happened to us?”).

“Do they like me?” Keith asked.

“You’ve met them before,” Lance pointed out. “They love you.” He pouted. “More than me.”

Keith laced his hand in Lance’s. “You’re crazy.”

“You love me for it,” he puckered his lips, but Keith rolled his eyes. Only dating for a few months, and Keith was _already_ impervious to his seduction. Lance was going to have to step up his game.

“Is this a… ?”

Lance followed his gaze. “Yeah, a juniberry flower. Mrs. Holt sends me these every year by the bushel. Luis thinks I should consider a side-gig as a florist, but I’m too attached.”

“Can I pick one?” Keith asked. He was still careful around Allura, but Lance didn’t blame him for it. Allura was a part of him, and Keith knew that too.

“Knock yourself out, buddy.”

He leaned down, plucking one from the ground. Carefully, he tucked it behind Lance’s ear. “There,” he declared. “Beautiful.”

Lance tugged him forward by his shirt and caught his lips in a kiss, sweet and painful and knowing and love. They hadn’t said _I love you_ yet, but he could taste it in each kiss.

Lance pulled away, but Keith leaned forward, dusting another kiss on his mouth. “I mean it,” he said, earnest.

“ _Te amo_ ,” Lance breathed.

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later. It’s a secret.”

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is kind of TERRIBLE, but the way i see it, the series epilogue was open-ended, and that is definitely key for klance. i hope you suffered my lack of proof-reading and enjoyed it a teensy bit!! comment, kudos, send me money, anything is good xx


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